Sep 1, 2014

We've been hearing about various DDR4 products for weeks, but only now will sales begin in earnest, because the motherboards and CPUs capable of using it have just been launched. That doesn't mean that people are too shy to test boundaries though.

Indeed, G.Skill has already taken the liberty of overclocking the stuffing out of its Ripjaws 4 Series of DDR4 memory modules, with liberal use of liquid nitrogen. Overclocking can mean many things, you see. Many motherboard makers have come up with a way to instantly push a system beyond normal boundaries, just by activating a BIOS function. That's just a safe option for people who don't actually know how overclocking works though. For people who do know the ins and outs, there are other options. Indeed, some may argue that top-tier hardware like Intel's new Core i7 Extreme Edition CPUs are specifically meant for overclocking sessions. This, but extension, means that the X99-based motherboards and DDR4 memory compatible with them are, likewise, meant for enthusiast overclockers.

The feature sets of these products have so far corroborated this point of view, even though, technically speaking, Extreme Edition Haswell-E CPUs are supposed to power high-end professional workstations more than gaming systems. You know, computers used for high-graphics design and simulations. Alas, gaming-centric systems get a lot more publicity, as do overclocking test benches, which is what led G.Skill to the decision to try and set a new OC record. Case in point, the company is not responsible for the highest frequency ever achieved by a DDR4 module: 4,004 MHz. Sure, this isn't saying much when the technology has only been (officially) available for merely a few days, but that's still a high performance level. After all, DDR4 is rated at 2,133 MHz, even though it has shown up in up to 3 GHz options.

The computer used to push the G.Skill Ripjaws 4 Series to 4,004 MHz was equipped with an ASUS ROG X99 Rampage V Extreme Motherboard and Intel's Core i7-5930K CPU (140W six-core unit with 12 threads, 3.5 GHz base clock, 3.7 GHz top clock and 15 MB cache memory). Lots of LN2 were used to keep heat low. Liquid nitrogen has been for a long time the preferred method for chilling hot hardware during crazy, manual OC tweaking. The next few days, weeks or months may or may not bring with them yet another overclocking record in this area. Now if only we knew the timings of the RAM, we'd at least be content.